Research and Harvest Updates

The unbearable heat here was broken a couple days ago with a thunderstorm! Even though I’ve experienced plenty of those in Ithaca, they’re always kind of exciting for me as a native to the San Francisco bay area. The rain was refreshing and much needed, and I’m hoping (for the sake of my research project) that it will bring some olive fruit flies. Of course, for the sake of the olives, I hope it’s not a bad year. Despite my hope that over the course of six weeks in the summer I would catch some, I have two weeks to go and still not a single fly in sight. In the meantime, I have been working on a description of my experiment and instructions for checking the traps to leave for the garden manager and future volunteers at the farm. It will definitely be interesting to see if this experiment helps with the olive fruit fly problem later in the season, but I still hope I can see my project in action before I leave.

I also started another small project to test whether different ratios of manure, potting soil, and soil from the farm had effects on seed germination times. I have planted four trays of 54 soil blocks each with lettuce and St. John’s wort in different potting mix combinations. Hopefully this will yield some helpful results for the farm, and it could be an interesting comparison between the effects on cultivated plants vs. wild herbs.

In the garden we are starting to get TONS of tomatoes (well, kilograms, but still), which is exciting because that means delicious salads and pasta! We also needed to cut back the basil and ended up harvesting five bins packed full of it! I got to help clean some in the kitchen where it will soon be made into pesto. I also learned an interesting tip: to keep the basil from oxidizing and turning brown once it is made into pesto, the chef here blanches about half of the leaves that will go into the sauce. The rest are blended up fresh because they have a stronger flavor, so you get a delicious and green pesto! You can also eat the basil flowers, which are sweet but quite delicate and tedious to pluck off. I would love to try out a basil flower pesto soon though!

This much pesto, times 5.

Basil flowers

There was a “Notte Bianca” festival here in Tuscania last weekend, which was a night of festivities where the streets of the town were filled with vendors selling food, drinks, and artisanal goods. From what I’ve heard, the name of the event, meaning “white night,” comes from an expression that refers to being unable to fall asleep all night. Apparently the tradition was started in Paris, and the idea is that all the shops stay open and everyone stays up all night celebrating. The Tuscania one only went until about 1 am, and I was home by 11 and was (very) able to fall asleep. I got to try some deliciously interesting food though! I had some sort of fried ball of lavender risotto, and fried squash flowers, which I can’t believe I’ve never had before! I’m also hoping to experiment with cooking the many squash flowers we have here on the farm sometime soon! I’ve also learned that cucumber flowers are quite refreshing in salads. That’s all for now, but I’ll keep posting about my culinary and agricultural adventures!